


Metro

by Eireann



Category: Star Trek: Enterprise
Genre: F/M, Heartache
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-12
Updated: 2014-04-12
Packaged: 2018-01-19 02:12:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,573
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1451647
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Eireann/pseuds/Eireann
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Songfic.  Hoshi travels to England and encounters a familiar face.</p>
<p>Inspired by 'Metro' performed by Berlin. </p>
<p>Written in response to a suggestion from VesperRegina, and dedicated to her with thanks.  Artwork by the same talented lady!</p>
            </blockquote>





	Metro

**Author's Note:**

  * For [VesperRegina](https://archiveofourown.org/users/VesperRegina/gifts).



> Star Trek and all its intellectual property belongs to Paramount. No infringement intended, no profit made.
> 
> The lyrics of 'Metro' have been removed over copyright infringement issues but can be found online. There are some sad, sad people around.

The bar’s crowded, but she doesn’t care.

She needs crowds right now, needs the distraction.  And yet, as she finally sits down with her glass of white wine – nicely chilled, and tasting of Loire grapes – Hoshi realizes with a sense of weary, bitter inevitability that there’s nowhere you’re more alone than in a crowd.

She hardly remembers now why she came to London.  It had seemed important at the time, important enough to put her on the _Internacional_ with a small overnight bag and directions to a discreet office.  Even now, there are elements that blame Starfleet for provoking the Xindi attack and Romulan War after it, and outside San Francisco the organization tends to keep its head down somewhat. That one day the world will regard its position on the interplanetary stage as entirely positive, she is sure, but for many that day has not yet come.  So it pays to be a little ... careful.

It was equally inevitable that coming here would trigger memories she’s been trying for too long to bury.  Memories of a time when two utterly incompatible people thought it possible to solace their individual lonelinesses in each other.

This, after all, was his country.  The orders to come here had cost her a momentary pang of disquiet, though it was soon stifled; what, after all, was the likelihood of bumping into one man here, in a city whose population alone ran into the tens of millions?

What, indeed.

It shouldn't have surprised her that when she left the station the heavy-hanging clouds had finally let loose the promised downpour.  Rain in England always seems have a quality entirely its own, wetter and more depressing than anywhere else she’s ever been, and that includes a fair few planets.   Chilled, apprehensive and miserable, she’d been concentrating only on getting to the taxi rank.  She wanted to get her business done and get out of here.  Tiring or not, she didn’t want to spend even a night in this country.  She’d get her tickets changed and go back to Waterloo and the _Internacional_ as soon as her work was done.  Anything but stay here, where there are too many people who speak with an accent that drags at her soul, ripping at old wounds that have never quite healed.

And there, in the anonymous crowds, she’d discovered that even remote likelihoods can never be discounted entirely.  Be they millions against, still the one remains.  The one that says the man you accidentally bump into turns at the sound of your voice stammering apologies, and that seeing those eyes again makes you stop as though you’ve run into a brick wall while around the two of you the world runs on, suddenly and entirely disconnected.

She should have known; she should have been prepared.  Hadn’t she had a warning, on the Métro that morning, as she’d headed for Paris's Gare du Nord Station like a condemned royalist borne towards Madame la Guillotine in a tumbril?

There had been a MACO.  Not – of course – one of those from her days aboard _Enterprise_ , but the sight of the uniform had set her heart thudding all the same.  If she’d have been able to she’d have gone elsewhere, but the carriages were full.  She’d had little option but to take the seat next to him, trying to sit so that not even their sleeves brushed.  The fact that he was apparently sleeping had been a deft excuse.  Of course she didn’t want to wake him.

If she’d thought it was any more than a coincidence she’d have turned and run; she’d have invented an illness, she’d have moved heaven and earth to give her some reason not to board the train that would take her to England.  But she didn’t.  And now in the rain, here _he_ is, still slight, still quiet, with a white scarf wrapped around his neck – the only lightness in the darkness of his clothing.  His hands are dug into the pockets of the long leather coat buttoned tightly up to his neck, and they make no move to touch her.

He's older, but who isn't – a good many liters of water have passed beneath the bridge of time since she saw him last. He's grown his hair longer too; it's soft and unruly. There are strands of white in it, some of them, she's sure, an affectation, but it somehow suits him. She notices at once that there are more lines on his face, which always looked older than his years, and in spite of everything the old tenderness tugs at her briefly.  He’s too thin, and he isn't taking enough care of himself. He never did.

"Hoshi," he says gently.  Just the one word, and though there's a world of feeling behind it, at the poverty of his speech all the old helpless anger surfaces too. This was what drove them apart, her words and his silences: what began as fascination turned to incomprehension, exhaustion and finally antipathy.

Even now, she can't achieve indifference. She still cares, even if it's not the old, wild hurting.  If wishes were horses things would be different, but then so many other things would be different too. 

Words... She's a trained linguist, one of the best, and there are still no words that can span the abyss and turn back time.  She can curse in Ancient Klingon and compose stanzas in Mandarin, and none of it is any use, or ever would be.

His eyes are the same.  Gray pools of shadow. They study her, and she thinks fancifully that he can map out the intervening years from what he sees in her face. 

In these circumstances, it's usual to make meaningless inquiries as to how the other has fared. Words, to cover a silence that can so quickly and easily become a sea of awkwardness.  In this particular case, they'd be even more pointless than usual, for she has no doubt that he knows exactly how her life has gone since they parted, while for the same reasons it would be totally useless to inquire after his doings. After _Enterprise_ , while they were still an item, he'd worked for R&D. Shortly after the break-up, however, she'd heard that he'd quit his post and vanished. Had it not been for certain of Jon's contacts in Starfleet, she'd never have known that he'd returned to the service of Section 31. 

She remembers Jon's face as he'd told her.

"Seems I was right about him all along," he'd said, grieving. "He never really quit."

Privately she'd thought it was more a case of her ex-lover seeking out an altar on which to lay his now unwanted fidelity, but that wasn't something Jon would have wanted to hear.  And Malcolm was a grown man, who had to make his own decisions and live with them.

Or die by them, if that was where his choices took him.

So, as one does, they spoke of things that meant nothing: of the delays to the flight from the US, and the way it always rains here in England.  Of the cold of Paris and how the lights along the Seine still reflect in the water; as they did before, when the words and the silence hadn’t yet become mutually exclusive and love and laughter had formed a bridge that spanned the gulf between them.  They’d rented a flat and in between long sessions of love she’d tried to teach him French, though he’d muttered about Azincourt and Crécy and the old hatreds; Reeds have long memories, it seems.

She still has his last letter.  Old-fashioned as he is, he still prefers pen and ink for anything that truly matters to him.

"I will always love you."

So he will, and the knowledge aches and grinds inside her like a tumor that can't be excised. She no longer wants his love, but he can no more take it back than he can sprout wings and fly. Just the sound of her name on his lips tells her nothing has changed. He's bedded other women and dreamed they were her, and if she could put her hand into his chest and tear his heart out of it that would be some release, but since that can’t happen they’re both prisoners of the past.

The thing with Jon ... it wasn’t intended, it just happened.  He was grieving over Erika, she was getting over Malcolm.  Now they fill a hole in each other’s lives, and it’s something; they understand one another, and sometimes if one of them cries out the wrong name it’s not unforgivable.  He gives her a sense of safety that Malcolm, with his wounds and his secrets, never could.

Just before they drew into the Gare du Nord, the MACO had woken.  As he’d reached for his kit-bag, just for a moment their eyes had met, the brief touch of strangers.  He was so young, hardly older than the young men and women who’d died out in the Expanse.  And almost against her will, and utterly to her horror, she’d found herself thinking, _If only it had been Malcolm who died..._

She could have mourned him then, and never lived to hate him.

The wine is finished.  Her glass is empty.  Somewhere out there he’s walking away in silence, and the memory of his sorrowful parting smile is burned on her mind like a brand.

 

**The End.**

**Author's Note:**

> All reviews gratefully received.


End file.
